1. Field of the Invention.
This disclosure relates to computer disk drives generally, and more particularly to methods of hingedly mounting disk drives within a computer system.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the past, installation, maintenance and upgrading of storage drives either in desktop personal computers or in rack mountable systems in a central location has often posed difficulties because of the mounting arrangement used and limited space available for accessing connectors and other components of storage drives. This makes access to them difficult in most cases due to the presence of power supplies, boards, other external drives, and other various sheet metal and other plastic parts. Indeed, in systems where multiple drives are installed, access to one drive may be considerably hampered by the orientation and cabling of the other drives.
Furthermore, typical external drive peripheral connections and cables are located at the rear of such external drives, e.g., for tape, CD, DVD, floppy and hard drives. Access is therefore difficult for such drives even after the computer cover is removed.
Because of such difficulties of access to computer drives, in the past users have often been faced with having to make blind connections and in many cases, to navigate their hand through narrow sheetmetal openings. In addition to resulting in inefficiency in installation, maintenance and upgrading of computer drives, poor user accessibility to computer drives in the past has lead to improper connections, damaged components and even injury to the user.
What is needed is an improved method of mounting drives in a computer system that allows for easy and fast access to the drives and to their connections for installation, maintenance, upgrading and other purposes.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide an improved drive mounting system which is capable of housing multiple drives within a limited centralized area while also providing quick and easy access to the drives, and in particular the rear of the drives, when necessary. It is a further object of this invention to provide such an improved drive mounting system with a minimum of parts, for economy and ease of construction.
The present invention discloses an improved drive cage mounting bracket apparatus for mounting multiple storage drives, the bracket hingedly connected to the computer chassis to rotate about an axis in the plane of the drives, whereby the entire bracket with mounted drives may be rotated into an open position that presents easy access to the drives and particularly to the rear of the drives.